Conferences and events offer great opportunities for professional development. They provide valuable opportunities to meet new colleagues, and catch up with others you might not get to see very often. Whilst programs of talks, papers, posters and panels can be a great chance to hear about what others in the industry are working on and find new ideas to take back to your own work place.

Conferences and professional development events are common in library land. Some of these are small, local events, and some are huge affairs – such as the annual conference of the American Library Association, which typically attracts in the area of 20,000 librarians.

For the next two weeks we will be posting about conferences and events from different angles to explore what makes a great event and how you can get the most out of them.

Some questions to begin discussions with your partner are:

Have you ever been to a library conference or professional development event? Where and when was it?

What was the best conference or event you’ve ever been to? What was good about it?

What do you do before a conference to prepare?

What do you think is the best bit of a conference – the program, or the informal networking? Or something else?

There’s a lot of information presented at conferences – how to you remember it all when you go home?

Are there conferences that you’ve heard about that you’d like to go to?

Have you got a great conference or event story you’d like to share with the ILN community? You can share it in the comments below or email us at contact@interlibnet.org to submit a guest post for this blog. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

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12 Comments

How timely! Being what I like to call a ‘librarian at large’, this week I’ll be #sketchnoting at the Emerging Technologies in Higher Vocational Education in Cape Town.
If this catches your fancy you can catch my tweetfeed at #capekate or follow the conference overall at #etinheconf

Surely this is a very good discussion. I have at least attended three conferences one being IFLA- WLIC in Singapore where I got a chance to meet ILN member that lead to my joining. Others are SCECSAL and AFLIA in Africa and all these are association of Librarians and Information Science fraternity and they act as platforms where we meet and exchange ideas of importance through paper presentations and posters

My most memorable conference was IFLA in Singapore in 2013. It was my first international conference and I loved every minute of it! I also had the opportunity of presenting. What I loved about attending the IFLA conference was meeting such a range of people, all doing amazing programs in their respective libraries. I found it all very inspiring.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library will jointly host the conference ‘Academic Librarian 4 – Sustainable Academic Libraries: Now and Beyond’ on 2-3 June 2016. If you are interested in this topic, please consider coming to Hong Kong. I will be more than happy to show you the libraries here. Please see the conference web site: http://library.ust.hk/al4/

Wow!…You have made me remember IFLA 2000, Boston, Massachusetts.
The meeting of librarians of the world in a city … and the city opens up for us! Harvard, MIT, Public Library … incredible experience!
Retain the friendship of David Sandy Philippines.
People: hosts and visitors made an unforgettable party !!!

I love attending library conferences. I’ve been to many over the years but I think my favorite has been Internet Librarian (IL) in Monterey, CA. It’s usually at the end of October every year in Monterey. There are so many great “tracks” (general topic areas), wonderful sessions to attend and speakers from all over the country. IL is open to librarians in all kinds of settings: academic, public, and school media librarians; this is nice because most conferences focus on one aspect of librarianship, but IA focuses more on trends and commonalities of libraries in general. You have the chance to intermingle with people from different backgrounds instead of just one specific setting which is great since you get various ideas and perspectives to try in your own workplace. I may try going again next year while I still qualify as a student and can get the discounted rate because it is well worth it, especially if you are into technology. There is also great “swag” to be had from the vendors. 🙂 Website: http://internet-librarian.infotoday.com/2015/

I love attending library conferences. I’ve been to many over the years but I think my favorite has been Internet Librarian (IL) in Monterey, CA. It’s usually at the end of October every year in Monterey. There are so many great “tracks” (general topic areas), wonderful sessions to attend and speakers from all over the country. IL is open to librarians in all kinds of settings: academic, public, and school media librarians; this is nice because most conferences focus on one aspect of librarianship, but IA focuses more on trends and commonalities of libraries in general. You have the chance to intermingle with people from different backgrounds instead of just one specific setting which is great since you get various ideas and perspectives to try in your own workplace. I may try going again next year while I still qualify as a student and can get the discounted rate because it is well worth it, especially if you are into technology. There is also great “swag” to be had from the vendors. 🙂 Website: http://internet-librarian.infotoday.com/2015/

I consider very interesting although sometimes the speakers lose their sense of time. For me it is an opportunity for training and meet people, even I have not attended international events but annually to the conference organized by our national association SEDIC. I have a special memory that we organize on the media, where I part of the academic committee organizing and moderating a pannel discussion where we were women and were all nerves. In the end it went well and the discussion was very interesting.
Whenever you bring things, and we must be in some way!
Myriam